[Vision2020] Wrong About the Bible: Slavery

[Ralph Nielsen]

[Vision2020] Wrong About the Bible: Slavery

Andreas Schou ophite at gmail.com
Fri Feb 2 10:40:59 PST 2007

On 2/2/07, Ralph Nielsen <nielsen at uidaho.edu> wrote:
 > I appreciate the humanistic opposition to slavery in Rev. Davidson's
 > essay, but trying to use the Bible to condemn slavery is a lost
 > cause. No amount of theological wiggling or squirming can rescue him.
 > Nor can mistranslating or taking the biblical text out of context aid
 > his cause.
 >
 > The unpleasant truth is that the Bible supports slavery from cover to
 > cover.

Ralph --

You're making the same counterfactual assumption to trash the Bible
that Doug does to support it: that the Bible is itself a unitary text.
The argument that dozens of authors, recorders of stories, and
redactors had the same intentions when writing over thousands of years
is a non-starter; the argument that the Bible is complete and
infallable is extrabiblical. Saying that the Bible 'supports' or 'does
not support' something is nonsense: no book that contains both the
axioms 'eye for an eye' and 'turn the other cheek' can be considered
to have any internal textual unity.

There are threads within the Bible that condone slavery (though not
the form of intergenerational racial slavery we had in the United
States), threads that are suspicious of it, and threads that condemn
it. Contra Doug Wilson, the abolitionist movement was, at its core, a
Christian movement -- and it found its textual support, as all
Christian movements do, in the Bible.

-- ACS

Andreas --

I don't think you're being fair here. I know perfectly well that the  
Bible is not a unitary text--whichever Bible you wish to discuss:  
Jewish (both Torah and Tanakh), Catholic, or Protestant. It is people  
like Wilson who make that claim.

If you know of any book, chapter or verse in anybody's Bible that  
condemns slavery, I would like to hear about it.

RN